A Painfully Detailed (Ha! Get It?) Description of my Egg Retrieval

First things first: 16 eggs, 12 fertilized naturally with IVF (no ICSI here.) I will find out my transfer date tomorrow.

At 6 AM yesterday (oh, who are we kidding, I was actually up tossing and turning starting at 5) I got up and headed over to my clinic. This was the first time I arrived right when they opened, and it was like a scene out of a play: the curtain opens outside the door to a fertility clinic. A dozen people stand outside in perfect silence, desperation and resignation written on their faces. None of the women look younger than 35 and no one smiles, either to themselves or to each other. If there is a sisterhood here, it is a sullen one. The door opens: wordlessly, everyone forms a single-file line and heads in.

Surreal. Anyway, once I finally got in, it was the usual pre-procedure drill: confirm my name and birthdate a few thousand times, put on a bracelet, sign the consent forms, change into the hospital gowns and grippy socks. I did find that after all these injections, I no longer get squicked out about watching needles go into my skin, so I watched the whole time as the nurse put in my IV (and saw the giant bruise start to form that I just knew was going to happen.) I took a single pill of Ativan and she had me wait on a gurney and gave me a magazine at random - the issue of Lucky where Elizabeth Banks describes her struggle to get pregnant and eventual decision to use a gestational carrier. I read the article and tried to think to myself, this is okay, Elizabeth Banks did this, you can do it too.

But as much as I'd like to just keep asking myself WWEBD (What Would Elizabeth Banks Do?) and act accordingly, I bet that she had actual anesthesia for her retrieval. Which brings me to the part of my story where I was totally right to be concerned about the conscious sedation. Don't worry, I'm not experiencing post-anesthesia PTSD or anything, but damn, I felt everything. After getting my legs in place and draping over my personal region, the nurse hooked up my IV to a syringe of Fentanyl. She sat on my left side and took my left hand in hers and put her right hand on the syringe. She explained that she was going to hold my hand the whole time and push the Fentanyl with her other hand as needed - um, okay. It was weird to hold a stranger's hand, but then she pushed a small amount of the Fentanyl and it was like getting drunk very quickly: sure, I'll hold your hand, especially since you're buying this round! She started asking me questions about my siblings and I knew that she was just talking to me to distract me, but at that point my RE came into the room and I was glad to have something to focus on besides what was going on in my vagina. Which was: two burning pains from the local anesthetic as it was injected on either side. A prolonged and sharp digging sensation as he worked on my right ovary and then the same thing on the left. The really bad part was when he said "so, in order to get these last two eggs, I'm going to have to puncture the endometrioma. Okay?" I said okay, and then as he stabbed it, I squeezed the nurse's hand really tightly in spite of myself. It felt like, well, being stabbed! I was still with it enough to feel him do the mock transfer (which appeared to be just putting a catheter into my uterus and wiggling it around for a second under ultrasound), but after that I have no memory until I was laying on a gurney in the recovery room with an IV of antibiotics going into me. I don't remember whether I walked to that gurney, which honestly bothers me more than the memory of the pain itself - I really don't like knowing that I was walking and talking with no knowledge of what I said or did.

This is the other strange thing: once I was in recovery, the pain began to really mount. It started around a 1 or a 2 on a scale of 10, but kept building until I described it to the nurse as more like a 4-5. I was starting to panic because they were saying things like "maybe you'll be out of here in a few minutes" and I didn't know where this was going to level out and didn't want to find out the hard way, and the nurse said the only thing she could do was push more Fentanyl, but that would delay our departure which apparently they didn't want to do. I mean, it kind of seems to me like I shouldn't have had to bring my own drugs to the clinic, but eventually they settled on having me take some of the Percocet that I had been given after my surgery in October that I brought with me just in case (once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout) which then made me predictably nauseous - somehow we managed to drive home with the help of a pillow cushioning my belly from the seatbelt and one of those kidney-shaped containers in case I ralphed in the car.

I spent the rest of the day in bed trying to figure out whether the pain or the nausea was bothering me more, though the winner became pretty clear when I started repeatedly throwing up.  I finally got some soup in me around 8 PM and took my doxycycline and medrol around 10 when it seemed like things were going to stay down. I slept okay last night and am back at work today with a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol and a heating pad strapped discreetly beneath my sweater - in an ideal world, I'd have taken today off, but I just don't have the time. Besides, it's better than waiting around at home obsessing about the 12 embryos in a lab across town that contain genetic material from both me and Harry (a very weird concept, but frankly, I'm thrilled that they have a babysitter today because I am just not up to childcare in my current state.)

So that's where things stand - if you've been reading some of my earlier posts, you will know that I harbor no small amount of anger about having to undergo the physical pain and trauma of IVF. Now that retrieval is behind me, I do feel some relief, although as I get farther and farther away from the pharmacologically induced relaxation of yesterday's sedatives, I am seriously considering changing clinics for our next attempt. Other bloggers have described how nice it was to feel the drugs knock them into unconsciousness before any needles were taken to their ladyparts, and I've seen lots of terms like "Operating Room" and "Anesthesiologist" thrown around. My retrieval was in a slightly-larger-than-usual exam room - definitely not an OR. And the highly scientific hand-squeezing technique that the nurse used is, I'm sorry, no substitute for a heart monitor or an EEG to measure pain response. I had real surgery recently, and this was no surgery. This was an in-office procedure that is routine for their staff but not to the patient, and while many women may feel that this is an acceptable level of pain to achieve their dream of becoming a mother (or simply don't realize that they have a choice), I just don't agree. I'm not going to make any decisions now, but Harry and I will have a big talk about our next steps at some point.

On another note, I have to send some love out to AJ, who had her retrieval yesterday too; to Emily, who is planning out the next stage of her journey after getting this week's IUI results; and to Blondie, who is currently incubating the cutest lil' blastocyst. I hope that all of you get good news soon.